DUNEDIN, Fla. — The most obvious changes for the Toronto Blue Jays will be on display throughout spring training: Anthony Santander in the middle of the lineup. Andres Gimenez hoovering grounders all over the infield. Max Scherzer on the mound to start games. Jeff Hoffman, after some bridge work by Nick Sandlin and Yimi Garcia, out there finishing them.
Factor in an ascendant Vladimir Guerrero Jr., a healthy Bo Bichette and the slate of young players acquired at the deadline last summer and the Blue Jays should be a significantly better club than the one that finished a miserable 2024 at 74-88.
The front-facing upgrades, will, understandably, garner most of the attention during camp, as the upcoming season’s fate – and to some degree that of the current competitive window, as well – largely hinges on their work. But as impactful as they’ll be on the short-term outlook, the Blue Jays to less fanfare made a series of behind-the-scenes changes that will have a major bearing on the franchise’s medium-to-long-term trajectory.
Marc Tramuta takes over as amateur scouting director ahead of a draft in which the Blue Jays hold the eighth overall pick, but sacrificed their second-round choice for signing Santander, a free agent who’d received a qualifying offer. He’s tasked with improving a process that simply hasn’t produced enough players or prospects since Alek Manoah was taken 11th overall in 2019.
David Bell, the former Cincinnati Reds manager who was a finalist for the same job in Toronto when Charlie Montoyo was hired, joins the organization as a vice-president, baseball operations. He’s responsible for overseeing a farm system that’s collapsed in industry rankings over the past couple of years and is a consensus bottom-third team in third-party rankings.
And Justin Lehr is the club’s first minor-league pitching director, coming over from the San Francisco Giants where he was their highly regarded pitching co-ordinator. The Blue Jays’ pitching pipeline is severely fractured – only six of the 34 hurlers they used in 2024 were developed in the system, with four of them no longer in the organization – and that break is compounded by eight pitchers undergoing elbow reconstruction surgery.
Combined with a revamping of the major-league hitting staff – David Popkins is the new hitting coach, joined by assistant Lou Iannotti and incumbent Hunter Mense – the hires are designed to at minimum adjust, if not overhaul some organizational operating systems.
Doing so successfully is essential for the Blue Jays to become a more sustainable franchise than the one they’ve been the past few years, when they’ve relied on a high payroll to make external adds because they’re too thin to replenish from within.
Consider that in 2021, half of the 62 players they used were either drafted or developed in the Blue Jays system. Only six players from that ’21 team – which missed the post-season by a still heartbreaking one game – remain and the current 40-man roster features only nine homegrown players. Their pitching staff is currently projected to include only one member developed in the organization – Bowden Francis.
That isn’t a recipe for long-term success and combined with the pending free agencies of Guerrero and Bichette, is why the current competitive window is at risk of slamming shut.
Now, maybe the Blue Jays did enough in their winter shopping to get back into the post-season this year. But for that to be more than a desperate last gasp with what remains of this core group, they must start drafting and developing their way to a steadier future.
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The path to improving the internal-player pipeline begins with bringing better talent into the organization through the draft, with Tramuta set to spearhead the process in his second stint with the Blue Jays. He was initially lured over from Baltimore in late 2003 by Tony LaCava, who scouted the former St. Bonaventure University shortstop (the Los Angeles Dodgers made him a 45th round pick in 1991) and then befriended him when he returned to the Western New York school as a coach after his brief playing career.
Tramuta spent four years as an area scout, was promoted to part of a powerhouse national cross-checker group that included Tommy Tanous (now VP of amateur and international scouting for the New York Mets) and Billy Gasparino (now baseball operations VP for the Dodgers) and then joined the Mets in 2013 as assistant scouting director, moving into the head role there in 2017 and running six drafts.
Last year, he rejoined the Blue Jays as a special assistant before being promoted when Shane Farrell left in October for a player-development job with the Detroit Tigers, bringing a wealth of traditional and modern scouting experiences to his new role.
“I don't scout the same way I did 10 or 15 years ago,” says Tramuta. “There's so much more information now. The integration of modelling players, analytics, research and player development, mental skills, performance coaches – it's more efficient than it was when I started say 25-30 years ago. Especially in this role, 20 years ago, all you were really doing was evaluating talent and lining up a board.
“Now, there's much more managing across different departments, building relationships and synergy across those departments,” he continues. “Coming up not only with player plans, but knowing what are you good at developing. The hard data is something that I've really embraced. Any time you're making major decisions where you're talking about high dollars in anything in your life, you're going to do research. The scouts that have learned to understand the hitting metrics or the pitching biomechanics, those are the scouts that have elevated themselves in today's game.”
The most successful teams, he argues, are the ones that best manage to “marry both lenses” without weighing one too heavily over the other, a balance some within the Blue Jays feel has needed adjustment in recent years.
One of the trickiest elements in baseball decision-making is deciding which way to lean when the eye-test suggests one thing and objective data another.
“I think the best way I'd attack that is to ask questions, to listen, to learn where they're coming from and how they've put together their theories and answers. That's the most important thing,” says Tramuta. “Some of the best decisions start with, 'What do you think?' It's challenging people. I want to be challenged by other departments or the scouts that I have on staff. Part of our responsibility is to say, let's try to poke holes in the model and let's have the model try to poke holes into what we're seeing. … There should be no egos in the room. We should all be focused on one goal and that's having the best drafts.”
Pivotal to accomplishing that, Tramuta adds, is “staying disciplined to your process,” a mantra during his time with the Mets (players drafted under his watch include Mark Vientos, David Peterson, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Jarred Kelenic, Tylor Megill, Simeon Woods Richardson and Brett Baty) he wants to emulate with the Blue Jays.
“Whatever process you choose, it has to be repeatable – don't go off the guardrails trying to take too many risks,” he explains. “I'll take calculated risks – I'm not risk averse, we took a lot of high school players in New York – but we had a certain type that we liked, a certain identity, you could say. I'm not saying you have to have one. I'm saying, if you look at our drafts, you maybe would come up with, this is the type of player that we're were taking conceptually. But as long as you stay disciplined.”
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Onboarding better players through the draft is only the first step.
Once acquired, they need to be groomed for the majors and the Blue Jays haven’t yet created the type of advantage the tools and technology at their Player Development Complex were expected to provide.
A nature-vs-nurture element is at play there – were the players drafted simply not good enough, or were they not prepared as well as they could have been? Regardless, they head into the new season with a farm system widely viewed as being in the bottom third of the major leagues and lagging behind their American League East rivals.
Pre-season organization rankings
They also didn’t have a consensus pick among the pre-season top-100 prospects lists produced by Baseball America, MLB Pipeline, The Athletic and ESPN, although A-ball shortstop Arjun Nimmala cracked three of the four, topping out at No. 69 on ESPN. The Boston Red Sox, on the other hand, have two consensus top-10 players in outfielder Roman Anthony and second baseman Kristian Campbell, the Baltimore Orioles have third baseman Coby Mayo and catcher Samuel Basallo in the top 20, while the Tampa Bay Rays have a top-10 talent in shortstop Carson Williams, plus multiple players deeper in the to -100.
Bell’s hire is one way the Blue Jays are trying catch up, as he brings a unique combination of familial and big-league pedigree to the role. The grandson of Gus and son of Buddy, he played 12 years in the majors, coached four years in the minors, spent five years as a big-league coach and served in 2018 as the player-development VP for the Giants before taking over as Reds manager. He went 409-456 in six seasons before being fired last September.
With the Blue Jays, “David will be overseeing development and performance” alongside assistant general manager Joe Sheehan, says GM Ross Atkins. “The integration of the tools that have been developed over the years of helping players get better that are built with research, they'll be able to work closely together.”
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The need for development improvements is probably most acute on the pitching end of the spectrum. Consider these damning numbers:
• Francis, Manoah, Jordan Romano, Tim Mayza, Nate Pearson and Brandon Eisert were the only Blue Jays pitchers in 2024 that were developed by the organization, and now only Francis and Manoah remain;
• They logged a total of 213 innings – nearly half by Francis, who was originally drafted by Milwaukee and acquired midway through 2021 – a mere 15 per cent of the team’s 1,427.1 frames;
• That’s down from 290.2 innings, or 20 per cent, by eight pitchers developed internally in 2023, and 414 innings, or 29 per cent, from 10 internal pitchers in 2022;
• Manoah and seven pitching prospects – Ricky Tiedemann, Brendan Barriera, Landen Maroudis, Chad Dallas, Nolan Perry, Carson Pierce and Chris McElvain – underwent elbow reconstruction surgery.
Enter Lehr, who during his 14 years as a pro, including four big-league stints, lived many of the different experiences a pitcher can have. That informs, but doesn’t drive, his approach to grooming pitchers, as he also layers in his time in scouting, player evaluation, rehab and strength and conditioning work and outlining player goals along with how to get there.
“What I strive to do is blend the art of pitching with all of the information and tools that are available to help players get better, faster than they could have when I played,” he explains. “Certainly with the amount of information and technologies that are available, you can really accelerate players' development curve if you have a great foundation. But without that foundation, it’s really tough to take advantage of the information and resources.”
That is one of the elements the Blue Jays focused on during their navel-gazing on pitching development, feeling they’d perhaps tilted too far into pitch shape and design at the expense of mound management and pitchability. As a result, pitchers began plateauing as they moved to the upper levels and could no longer simply out-stuff hitters.
Lehr’s vision, in a nutshell, is “to be really good at laying the foundation of good-count leverage.”
“That's not the most shiny and flashy way to start, but if you can keep your pitchers in good, advantageous counts at every level, including the big-leagues, then they're far more likely to have success,” he explains. “I'm really confident in everyone that's there to be able to solve for damage, whether you do that through delivery or pitch design. But without that good foundation of count-leverage and managing counts, it's really tougher to solve for damage. So I look at things from a very practical manner at first, to solve for the lowest hanging fruits and then layer on the technical know-how and integration to help players reach their full potential. But I'm really big on making sure that they have a great foundation to build on.”
An essential blueprint for the Blue Jays not only in developing pitchers, but for the wider organization as a whole, too.
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